Jennifer Jones is a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute. Her work focuses on issues related to government transparency, government surveillance, and social media. Jones leads the Knight Institute’s litigation in Knight Institute v. Department of State, a Freedom of Information Act suit seeking records related to foreign state efforts to influence platforms’ content moderation. Additionally, she is leading the Institute’s efforts to secure the release of records related to public school districts’ use of spyware to enforce censorship policies restricting students and teachers from discussing race, gender, and sexual orientation in the classrooom.

Prior to joining the Institute, Jones spent three years at the ACLU of Northern California, where she worked with the organization’s Technology and Civil Liberties Project litigating a variety of matters involving privacy, government surveillance, and public access to information. She was a member of the teams litigating Williams v. San Francisco, a case brought by local activists challenging the San Francisco Police Department’s use of a private camera network to spy on demonstrators during the 2020 protests against police violence, and ACLU v. ICE, a Freedom of Information Act suit seeking records related to federal immigration enforcement agencies’ use of face surveillance systems. Jones also investigated and challenged various forms of surveillance deployed by government agencies in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic and mass uprisings. Her work included a public records investigation exposing the California Highway Patrol’s widespread aerial recording of protesters in more than 25 cities across the state during the summer of 2020.

Jones has been published in the UCLA Law Review and UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute’s Tech x Belonging series. She has been quoted in Reuters, The Guardian, Protocol, the San Francisco Chronicle, SF Standard, and WIRED.

Jones holds a B.A. in Sociology from UCLA, an MSW with an emphasis in community organizing, planning, and administration from the University of Southern California, and a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law. During law school, she served as an editor of the UCLA Law Review and National Black Law Journal, interned at the Advancement Project, and received the UC Human Rights Fellowship for her work at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Prior to law school, she spent six years coordinating care for youth exiting the family regulation system and advocating for equitable local and state education policies in California.